Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday January 07, 2012 @10:02PM
from the everything-counts-in-large-amounts dept.

smitty777 writes "China will start to publish air pollution reports, possibly in response to reports from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing which has been publishing its own data. This report is significant in that it's based on the PM2.5 standard, which measures the more harmful particles that are less than 2.5 microns. This comes on the heels of a separate report that lists China as the worst polluter worldwide. According to this report, China now produces 6,832 m tons of CO2, a 754% increase since 1971. While the U.S. is in second at 5,195 m, this represents an increase of only 21%. This article notes 'the rapid growth in emissions for China, India, and Africa. This will continue as their middle classes buy houses and vehicles. The growth in Middle East emissions is staggering, a reflection of their growing oil fortunes.' While we're on the subject of India, their pollution levels are thought to be responsible for a dense cloud of fog that is so thick it created a cold front, and is repsonsible for a number of deaths."

Half the US population will pretend that scientific consensus does not exist as they drive automobiles created with the fruits of science, the Chinese will fudge their numbers, and nothing will change.

As you type this in from a computer thats electricity was probably generated by natural gas or coal. (hint those are the two largest polluters in the world). As you sit in your house with its fertilized yard with fertilizer created from oil, on your chair with foam made from oil, in the room painted with oil, typing on plastic keys created by oil.... See my point?

It is *everywhere*. We as a society are addicted to the stuff. We use it by the metric ton.

What is my point of this? You sit all smug in your computer chair or couch or wherever saying others should 'listen to you'. Guess what you sound like a twat who tells others what to do without realizing you yourself are part of the problem. Want to change peoples minds? Its simple, pollution sucks. People get that. "we might be changing the climate" will get you a yawn and no one will really care. But lets say 100% of everyone gets the point. What is the alternative? The current one on the table (and being implemented) is higher taxes. That helps very little and does not actually make things better. It just means those who can afford to will pollute will while you pick up the tab. As those same companies can afford it (due to many of them being regulated monopolies). And companies will just do what they always do. They will pass down the cost to the consumer. As guess what I can not buy my electricity from someone else I pay a higher price for no change. I need to get to work so I can buy food for my family (so I have a car). Without a radical remaking of our entire society nothing will change.

What is my point of this? You sit all smug in your computer chair or couch or wherever saying others should 'listen to you'. Guess what you sound like a twat who tells others what to do without realizing you yourself are part of the problem. Want to change peoples minds? Its simple, pollution sucks. People get that. "we might be changing the climate" will get you a yawn and no one will really care. But lets say 100% of everyone gets the point. What is the alternative? The current one on the table (and being implemented) is higher taxes. That helps very little and does not actually make things better. It just means those who can afford to will pollute will while you pick up the tab. As those same companies can afford it (due to many of them being regulated monopolies). And companies will just do what they always do. They will pass down the cost to the consumer. As guess what I can not buy my electricity from someone else I pay a higher price for no change. I need to get to work so I can buy food for my family (so I have a car). Without a radical remaking of our entire society nothing will change.

This is not strictly true. The point of taxes on carbon emissions is that it helps to reduce externalities- costs that party A incurs and party B must pay, without an actual economic link between them. For instance, power plants currently emit pollutants (including greenhouse gases). Those pollutants ultimately result in costs (health care cost increases, infrastructure development to deal with changing climate, environmental reclamation costs) that are not paid by the entity that reaps the benefit from incurring them - the power plant operators. By placing a tax on the polluting activities, we cause those entities to pay for the costs that they are incurring. That cost more fully reflects the actual cost of the good that they are providing- electricity produced from coal, which levels the playing field for alternative energy sources which do *not* incur such external costs. *That* is the point of such taxation- to *level* the playing field by actually making every pay for all of the costs that they incur to society.

I wish people would get this right. The consensus is about the earth getting hotter, which would make sense since we're going away from an ice age, not toward one. There is no consensus about man's impact on the earth.

False, at least according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, consisting of hundreds of international scientists reviewing and synthesizing the data of their peers. If that's not a broad scientific consensus, I don't know what is.

Anthropogenic means human-caused. The report takes into account many different scenarios, comparing models with human activity and without, and none of the natural-only models fit the data well enough to be considered appropriate.

As in all science, there is always room for doubt and mistakes, but if you're going to claim that there is not a broad consensus, please cite some qualified sources.

Heat islands have been known and accounted for in the numbers used. At this point climate change is as certain as anything is and I haven't seen any credible scientists disputing the view that climate change is real and largely driven by human development.

It's quite well known what we're emitting and scientists have records that go back a long time that show a general relationship between temperature and atmospheric composition. At this point there's very little question about what's happening and why.

(I hope that you're sincerely interested in exploring this topic because I am too and I would be very interested in credible sources suggesting that there is in fact not a consensus among scientists that anthropocentric climate change is happening. I'll answer your concerns to the best of my abilities -- I'm just a student and still learning as I go.)

1. "Likely" means > 66% probability. I provided you a link to an excerpt of the full report (loooooong), and the same likelihood system is used throughout. See their explanation of likelihoods [www.ipcc.ch] (scroll to bottom). It is not the lowest category of confidence they have. I apologize for the lack of context; some of their FAQs [www.ipcc.ch] might provide more digestable, standalone summaries. The full report is a hard read -- I've skimmed through parts of it -- but the data and methodology is there if you care to dig deep enough.

2. I assume the "likely" you're referring to is in regards to surface temperature rise, but that's only one part of climate change. Other changes, such as the sea level increase, are considered "very likely" due to human influences.

3. The thing about climate change is that behavior "likely" to lead to a massive, abrupt change in our only habitat, potentially affecting millions of humans and countless more animals, is not a scenario to be taken lightly. There is ALWAYS room for error, but the best available data that we currently have suggest that we should be taking immediate corrective action. Until and unless better data appears, this seems to the best course of action. If we're later proven wrong due to some unforeseen causes, we'll have to make corrections... but that's the way science has always worked.

4. Heat islands are an example of cherry-picked "mistakes" that disprove ACC. The alleged mistakes (some of which were mistakes, some of which weren't) I've heard about have been corrected in later papers or studies and overall, the consensus still stands: Climate change is happening, and it's partially fueled by humans.

5. Both the wiki pages for climate change and heat islands reiterate my main point: That there is indeed a consensus among qualified scientists (as judged by their peers, mainly) that we are experiencing anthropogenic climate change.

If you have good sources that argue against that, please provide them.

I don't want to make Climategate seem trivial, because it certainly wasn't, but the issues involved in the controversy do not sufficiently change the overall scientific consensus.

To be clear: 1) There was inexcusable wrongdoing in that scandal. 2) The wrongdoing does not negate anthropocentric climate change.

Public opinion is easily swayed by sensationalist news, sometimes a little too much. As a president can fall to a sex scandal, so can a scientific topic be severely debased by a scandal of unethical beh

They don't "do" science in the sense that they don't go out to the field and perform experiments and collect data, but they do a very valuable service in that employ scientists to analyze and summarize the findings of the peers so that the public can be better informed.

From their webpage [www.ipcc.ch]:"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the leading international body for the assessment of climate change. It was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorologica

The Climategate stories I've read -- unfortunate and inexcusable as they are -- suggested it was an isolated incident with one particular group of scientists, not an entire conspiracy within the IPCC. If you have better information, please let me know.

The IPCC is both a political and a science education body. Although they don't collect the data themselves, they scrutinize the data of others in the field. They are a part of the United Nations, tasked to analyze and explain climate change to the public.

The consensus is about the earth getting hotter, which would make sense since we're going away from an ice age, not toward one.

That does not explain the sudden increase in temperature since the industrial revolution.

There is no consensus about man's impact on the earth.

I think that you will find that there is a consensus in the scientific community that global warming is affected by man. There may be variations in the estimates of how much is due to our CO2 output, but that does not mean that you should consider that the principles about climate change are wrong.

From the article, it would appear that mankind is curbing our inevitable heat wave.

Do you mean the cold front that appeared in one region over a short timespan? I do not think that you can extrapolate this to have any meaning for the entire planet.

And probably a similar percentage of homeopathic practitioners are convinced of the effectiveness of homeopathic remedies.
I'm agnostic on the existence, causes, and effects of global warming, and I hope my opinions won't be influenced by a consensus among a largely self-defined group of experts.

Short version; both are "ranked by expertise (number of climate publications)".

When your intellectual laziness reaches the point where you can't even be bothered to read what's been spoon fed to you, it's better to keep your mouth shut and appear pig-ignorant than it is to call yourself a 'skeptic' and remove all doubt. Skepticisim's fruits come primarily from applying it to one's own assumptions. Which is why I prefer the term 'psuedo-skeptic' for people who don't. As opposed to 'denier' which seems mor

With regard to the recurrent major ice ages that have occurred over the last couple of million years, this is likely a cosmological event and not driven by what occurs on the earth.

Not that the majority of the human population is clustered around the coast with the majority of major cities being coastal.

In the even of a significant flooding catastrophe making large areas of those cities uninhabitable, the pressure to imprison for life or execute those that were the major proponents of activities that l

In the even of a significant flooding catastrophe making large areas of those cities uninhabitable, the pressure to imprison for life or execute those that were the major proponents of activities that likely brought about those events will be undeniable. Whether corporate executive or politician, you can be assured that those affected both rich and poor will be screaming for their heads.

I doubt that. The ones against the wall will be the scientists, accused of not warning against the catastrophe, or the green energy industry, accused of not making solutions available at affordable prices.

There is actually negative evidence that has been measured. It is called Global Dimming. Global dimming effects are lessened rates of evaporation and cooler temperatures. Global dimming is caused by particulate matter from pollutants.So you could say that burning oil can regulate itself by some margin.http://www.globalissues.org/article/529/global-dimming [globalissues.org]

there's no consensus among oil companies that humans are affecting the climate. Scientists who actually have a clue do have a pretty good idea what's going on, and people like you are never going to believe what they have to say regardless of how much evidence gets shoved in your face.

why is it all you denier types think there is a vast conspiracy of grant-writing culture members but think that multi-billion dollar corporations WHO HAVE NO ETHICAL STANDARDS WHATSOEVER, exc

It's been very clear for me, that climate is behaving very strangely the last years where i live : ( a very wet previous autumn, a very cold winter with a lot more snow , a very warm spring , a very cold summer , a very dry autumn , a very mild winter , with occasional heavy storms )

My guess is that out of balance now, which is why we get such strange weather.

From the US census bureau numbers of world population, the US accounts for 4.48% of the world, with a Jan 2012 population date. They use a population date of Nov 2010 for comparison, and put China at 19.18% with relation to the current US census numbers (dont ask).
Seeing how we consider China to be a "developing industrial" nation, and the US "developed", whos the real dirty dog?

Quite a sophisticated argument to justify individual selfishness you have there.
So according to your logic, each country in the world should be allocated the exact same resources, without taking into regard the size of their population?

Well if that is what everyone agrees to - I guess I'm moving to Iceland! (pop. 320,000).

That's the point. The US is crying about China polluting, but Americans are wasting the most resources and polluting the most. Chinese are more economical and haven't even started looking at pollution and green energies until now. Americans seriously need to clean up.

We *shifted* the majority of our carbon emissions involved in manufacturing to China. A lot of China's emissions should be charged to *us*.

If that means that the industrial manufacturing base with all the low and middle income jobs and real wealth generation that goes with it, that followed our carbon emissions to China, returns to the US with the "charges", I say "where do we sign"?

According to this report, China now produces 6,832 m tons of CO2, a 754% increase since 1971.

Why not going back to numbers of middle age? That should be a quite impressive increase then. For anyone who knows Chinese history, it's obvious that activity in 1971 wasn't high, so it really doesn't make sense at all. And by the way, since when CO2 is one of the worth polluting component? Judging by the short version, it doesn't at all make me want to read TFA. Then I still did, and TFA is crap. Come to Shanghai, and I'll show you that the biggest issue isn't CO2!!!

No, it's actual air pollution. You know, that means elements that are NOT natural parts of the atmosphere. Things like CFCs, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, and industrial particulates. Those things are pollution.

CO2 is a natural component of the atmosphere. It may well be harmful in large enough quantities, but that doesnt make it pollution.

But 1971 is such a good year to pick, after a decade of China not only stopping any real industrialization, but instead falling apart in its manufacturing and technological base, while at the same time it was the start of the EPA and the Clean Air Act in the US. It helps skew the numbers the right direction for a politically motivated article.

/sarcasm

China in 1971 might as well have been the Democratic Republic of Congo technology and manufacturing wise, actually I think the Congo today outperforms what all of China did then!

It's not like the average Chinese citizen is gonna be charged $100,000 for a single hospital visit.

What do you mean here? You think health care in China is for free, like in France, or in UK? That's simply not the case, and a visit to the hospital can be really expensive. Also, there's all sorts of corruption there (like, you'd have to give a "red bag" to be able to choose which doctor you'd have and not get a just-graduated student). Let me tell you: you'd better not get sick in China!

1971 is a very sensible choice. 1971 marked the start of U.S. - China trade, which was the starting point of China's massive industrialization boom. China's pollution problems were minor until Tricky Dick's visit.

And while CO2 may not be the best number to measure for human health problems, it's an important measure with respect to global climate change. Other pollutants simply don't matter to the U.S. Chinese particulates are regional, and precipitate out long before they get across the Pacific. Remem

And while CO2 may not be the best number to measure for human health problems, it's an important measure with respect to global climate change.

That's the problem! We aren't sure of the scale of the effect of CO2. But we are 100% sure for the rest of. Like I'm 100% sure that I've been sick after going in the city center of Shanghai because of pollution.

Chinese particulates are regional, and precipitate out long before they get across the Pacific. Remember, as long as we get cheap consumer goods from them we don't care how much China pollutes their own sky, their own dirt[...]

So basically, even if it kills Chinese, you don't care, if at least it doesn't arm US citizen? What a selfish jerk! Or maybe that's "humor"? If so, that's not funny.

We only want to worry about their contribution to CO2 around the globe

This is why the CO2 scam is extremely dangerous. We're focusing on the wrong thing. Also, if it's down to pollution per hab, US is the c

Sorry, I wasn't trying to be funny, I'm trying to point out the positions that seem to be held by the Western governments, and the hypocrisy behind them, using sarcasm. Our words are those of "concern for human rights", but our actions are those of "we don't want to increase the prices we pay by demanding you clean up your environment or pay fair wages." It's terrible and it's ugly, and I hope China can suppress the corruption long enough to clean up your environment.

Thanks for taking the time to make yourself clear. I agree with the first part, but really, I'm not sure with the 2nd one.

While I'm 100% sure about toxins, as you said only "most climatologists" agree, but many who don't aren't climatologists which research would be funded to search a global disaster. This thing seem to be full of lobbying and it scares the hell out of me that each time I read a scientific paper about global warming, I also have to research who's writing it, as it's very often biased view

But that's why I consider it important. I don't think there's an argument about CO2 causing an effect, only the degree of impact. And the impact is very visible to me as I'm from Minnesota, and I can see that our winters have gotten progressively milder over my lifetime. (Yes, I know that's localized data and essentially meaningless over the globe, but it's certainly personal.) The ice caps are shrinking rapidly, according to people who measure such things, and satellite photos make such information vi

And the impact is very visible to me as I'm from Minnesota, and I can see that our winters have gotten progressively milder over my lifetime.

NO! First, that's not a scientific way of studying things, and it's charged with emotions from a very long time ago, which (sorry, but that's truth) your human brain can't deal with. Second, even if we could take into account your personal experience (I don't think it's valid, but let's admit so), then it doesn't tell you if it is caused by CO2 or if it's a natural process, let's say as an effect from the sun activity.

The ice caps are shrinking rapidly, according to people who measure such things, and satellite photos make such information visible to anyone.

There's a huge controversy about that. There's no doubts that it got hotter in the north,

1) I'm pretty sure gp meant the problem was pollution in the traditional sense (poor air quality), which is what most of the summary was about, is the bigger problem2) the dates make for a meaningless comparison,making I clear the article is a fluff piece.

CA on is a real problem, but is not what I assume the primary focus of the article is, as it's not generally called pollution.

These stories are another way to block CO2 reduction. Provide some statistics that make it look like China is main polluter and therefore they need to change before the US should.

I think the fairest way to measure this is CO2 per person (possibly with allowances made for cold countries). As each person has a requirement for energy for personal and economic use, that will require CO2 to be produced. Saying China should not be allowed to burn the same amount of CO2 per person as the US for cheep power and pet

Qatar is number one at 53.5 tons per person, followed by Trinidad and Tobago at 37.3 tons oddly enough.

Going down the list you find Australia to be the number one developed polluter per person at 18.9 tons, giving it 11th place. Immediately afterwords at 12th place is the US at 17.5 tons per person. We Canadians are 15th with 16.4 tons per person, and going down you find Russia at 12.1 tons per person or 23rd.

Germany is 37th with 9.6 tons per person, Greece is 41st with 8.8 tons, The UK is 43 with 8.5 tons. And France who can forget them at 6.1 tons, they are 65th.

For the drum roll, China is number 78th at a mere 5.3 tons per person.

All per the US Department of Energy's Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC)

This graph [cam.ac.uk] is more interesting - it shows Co2 emissions per capita against population (so area of rectange = absolute emissions). Being able to compare the area visually gives a better indication as to the degree of the problem in each nation. This graph [cam.ac.uk] shows another interesting thing - responsibility for cumulative/historical co2 emissions. Since co2 stays in the air for 50 to 100 years, the vast majority of co2 that is in the air right now was actually put there by the nations that were industrialised throughout the last century - ie. the US and Western Europe.

btw. The author of that book also addresses the issue of China:

What about China, that naughty “out of control”
country? Yes, the area of China’s rectangle is about the same as the USA’s,
but the fact is that their per-capita emissions are below the world average.
India’s per-capita emissions are less than half the world average. Moreover,
it’s worth bearing in mind that much of the industrial emissions of China
and India are associated with the manufacture of stuff for rich countries.

So, assuming that “something needs to be done” to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions, who has a special responsibility to do something? As I
said, that’s an ethical question. But I find it hard to imagine any system
of ethics that denies that the responsibility falls especially on the countries to the left hand side of this diagram – the countries whose emissions are
two, three, or four times the world average. Countries that are most able
to pay. Countries like Britain and the USA, for example.

Whether "it is fair to share CO2 emission rights equally across the world's population" is an ethical question, as is the question of who should pay to clean up a problem like this, but it is hard to construct a moral argument that a Westerner should be entitled to emit more co2 than a person born in another nation. Why should we have this entitlement?

How do you arrive at this premise? That the free market is entitled to write whatever rules it likes to beat china. That a persons worth and rights is proportional to his income, yes this does happen but there is no ethical or moral justification for it.

You still are equating a persons worth to his income/lifestyle. If everyone sat around in tents climate change would not be an issue.

To reduce CO2 emissions those cars should either not be made or be constructed more efficiently costing more. The pollution making the care effects both. Regardless of the reasons why, the car maker is destroying both peoples environment while the guy in the tent is innocent.

That logic only make moral and ethical sense if you are a selfish American supremacist capitalist (yes

I see where you are coming from but GDP still a terribly unfair way to do it and i would expect make it very difficult for other countries to compete (your phone factory gets a heavy tax because we patented the efficient way), so they will never sign up.

Upping your GDP by selling luxury items that consume large amounts of energy such as a 6 litre Dodge Viper should not be a good reason for extra consumption of CO2.

I do agree that someone has to make efficient technology to replace the old though but this is

You still are equating a right to pollute to a countries income/lifestyle

Just to clear up any ambiguities. I am not saying you think this is OK either, just that your justification requires it.

People in tents can't afford a lot of technologies used to pollute and therefore do not produce a lot of CO2. They will also not benefit from the car factory producing cars which will be bought mostly by "rich" or western people. Everyone suffers from global warming yet only the rich caused it.

We are producing more CO2 that can can be sustained (discuss the valididity of global warming els

A thousand people running an automobile production plant creates more pollution than a million people sitting around in tents doing nothing.

You are also asserting that a thousand people running an automobile production plant (let's say $200,000 worth of goods per person per year) get a free pass because the more automated plant down the road with 1000 employees puts out $2,000,000 of small electronics.

that's where the US is doing much better than China here: it's producing more economic output with less overall pollution.

It's producing nothing. McDonald's contributes to GDP, but shouldn't make significantly more pollution than people eating similar food at home, which contributes less to the GDP. A service economy where nobody "makes" anything will necessarily p

Wrong. When we talk about mitigating pollution, per capital numbers are meaningless. In the context of climate change, the potential harm is caused by the totality of greenhouse gas output. When government intervention is the only effective solution, we are forced to look at the problem and its solution as bounded by what each government is able to control. Since the Chinese government has power over the greatest amount of pollution, its participation in reduction treaties is essential, and its responsibili

Since the Chinese government has power over the greatest amount of pollution, its participation in reduction treaties is essential, and its responsibility to the future the greatest.

Yes this i agree with but what should China's limit be relative to US. I am saying that the fair way to do this per capita which either means that the US needs to better than half its emissions or that China's limit would be set sufficiently high that it will not bother them until they are 4 times their current output.

I guess it shouldn't be surprising anymore that the concept of "per capita" is once again completely omitted to make a headline rather than a point?7000 MTon vs 5000 MTon... hmm doesn't sound impressive enough, let's try 754% vs 21%!! Oh my god!

How about 5.4 Ton/person (China) vs. 16.7 Ton/person (U.S.)?Or better yet, how about 90+% of U.S. consumer needs being shifted to China?

Not only is China already more efficient in what it does for the CO2 it's producing compared to the U.S., it's supplying the rest of the world too. What's the complaint here?

Since you are all about efficiency: What is the per capita emissions in terms of people who actually benefit or live the life associated with it?

Here's the thing you either don't know or choose to ignore about China: It is not uniform in the way the population lives. There are two Chinas, more or less. The "city" China is the one you always hear about. Large, modern (in most ways) cities very densely packed, lots of heavy industry and so on. This is, of course, where the pollution happens. Then there's the

Yes, it is true the US produces a hell of a lot of CO2 per capita. It is also true that the US has the good fortune, climate wise, to be an overall net absorber of CO2.

Actually, the claim is wrong and the article you link to is either incompetent or a lie. The author carefully (or carelessly) picked the net emission map from July 2009. Spring and summer is the main growing season for yearly plants, and for deciduous forests. That's why the plants in the Northern hemisphere pick up a lot of CO2 in the summer. Of course, they release most of it again in fall and winter, when leaves and other plant matter decompose. A meaningful comparison can be only made for a full seasona

Well, supposedly the data comes from Japan's IBUKU satellite. The article lists the launch date, not the range of data analysis.
The person doing the lying is apparently:
Yasuhiro Sasano, Director of Japan's National Institute for Environmental Studies

Read again what I wrote. The JAXA report is fine. It shows the CO2 flux for 4 different seasons, with 3 of them showing the US as a net emitter and one showing it as a net absorber. The O'Sullivan blog takes this one graph out of context, either intentionally or through ineptness, and claims it represents the overal flux. It does not.

If you look at current global CO2 levels, the variation is between 380 and, oh, about 390 right now.
The US seems to stay way below this most of the time.

Soo, I dunno. Looks to me lik "net absorber" but obviously interpreting a graph is a pain, esp when things are going steadily up due to overall worldwide production.
Some sort of numbers would be nice, compared against the smoothed average.
Got a data table somewhere?

It looks like the data has been released here [nies.go.jp], but doing the reduction will be a pain in the ass.

If you look at your graph carefully, then most of the world seems to be low in CO2. But there is this small note saying "XCO2 in the figure has a 2-3% negative bias". 2-3% of 390 ppm is around 10 ppm. Add this to the values you see in the colour-coding, and things change.

This is a funny numbers game. CO2 is far from the worst greenhouse gas, so all these people posting their reactions about Americans and their big suv's, cars whatever, need to look more closely at which gases cause the most greenhouse effects, and where these gases come from.

You can fit me into the "greenhouse deniers" if you like, but I'm suspicious of pretty much all the data that is surrounding this issue -- there is too much money to be made on "popular" science like this for there to be any real hope of getting sound scientific data right now...

I've also yet to hear anyone make a reasonable sounding proposal to make any positive changes, its always up in the air stuff like "We all need to hold hands and plant trees and drive less" -- that's absurd. Lowering pollution is a good idea whatever the effects on temperature so I'm all for this goal, but to actually get to the point of seriously damaging the economy and lives we've all come to like living isn't going to happen and shouldn't. These are scientific issues and probably have scientific solutions.

People seem to want impossible things on this issue. Hippies are an illogical group of people who work solely in knee-jerk reactions and boogey-man scare tactics, they just complain without making much sense. Coal power bad, but nuclear is bad too! Damn, these goes our safest and best way to generate power. It all has to be hippie-power, hydro and solar. Yeah, well, if that worked then why wouldn't they use it, they can fleece us on power bills with solar or hydro just as easily as coal or nuke.

Oddly enough far, far less then can be made from working with various PR groups (eg. Heartland Institute) denying it. A puzzle writing snakeoil salesman like Monckton makes more money as a travelling climate "expert" than any Nobel prize winner, and it's the same with the various economists that are rolled out to supply the feelgood message that we don't have to do anything.Do you really think people are freezing their arses off in the coldes

Oddly enough far, far less then can be made from working with various PR groups (eg. Heartland Institute) denying it. A puzzle writing snakeoil salesman like Monckton makes more money as a travelling climate "expert" than any Nobel prize winner, and it's the same with the various economists that are rolled out to supply the feelgood message that we don't have to do anything.Do you really think people are freezing their arses off in the coldest places on the planet faking data when they could be at home faking it where it is warm?This weird science denying crap is annoying.

Well, is that a fact, though?

Also, even if so, that doesn't actually change anything -- because what you are talking about are lobby groups, not scientific researchers. Lobby groups always make a tonne of cash, but take a good look at the number of environmental organizations that are actually lobby groups, there are a great many of them and they all appear to be well funded. Its easy to say, "oh look, this climate change skeptic got paid a bunch.." but look at the other way, entire pro-climate change organ

Those nicely shifted goalposts may give you a warm fuzzy feeling but to me they tell me enough to let me know that we have left the realm of rational discussion long behind. Enjoy writing your fiction kid but I'm going elsewhere where there are a few less idiotic luddites that like to pretend that science is worthless.

Turn on the TV, read a newspaper, or go find some news on the internet. Oh that's right, you already did know but you are just pretending to be incredibly ignorant for the sake of pretending to win some sort of argument.Also even loonies like Monckton get a hell of a lot more than that million.

I'm guessing you don't see any contradiction here? Or are you referring to all those researchers who have apparently been getting rich doing climate science? Coz I'm not seeing any - maybe they're hiding behind all the oil billionaires.

These are scientific issues and probably have scientific solutions.

And if they don't? I'd actually call dramatic increases in storms/drought/famines/conflicts/refugees something more than a "scientific problem".

This is a funny numbers game. CO2 is far from the worst greenhouse gas, so all these people posting their reactions about Americans and their big suv's, cars whatever, need to look more closely at which gases cause the most greenhouse effects, and where these gases come from.

It would have been nice if you had written those greenhouse gases. Let me do that for you: sulfur hexafluoride is the most potent greenhouse gas (luckily, we don't release a lot to the atmosphere, or things would be much different today), and the biggest contributor to the greenhouse effect is water vapor. After that, the biggest contributors are carbon dioxide, methane and ozone, which human beings release. This raises the atmosphere's temperature, causing indirectly more water vapor. There.

You can fit me into the "greenhouse deniers" if you like, but I'm suspicious of pretty much all the data that is surrounding this issue -- there is too much money to be made on "popular" science like this for there to be any real hope of getting sound scientific data right now...

This is a funny numbers game. CO2 is far from the worst greenhouse gas, so all these people posting their reactions about Americans and their big suv's, cars whatever, need to look more closely at which gases cause the most greenhouse effects, and where these gases come from.

From such a statement, you have clearly not read much of the scientific research on climate change. The most potent GHG is water vapor, however it's atmospheric life is measure in days. Another potent GHG is methane, with an atmospheric life of 10 years. CO2 on the other hand has an atmospheric life of a century or more. That's what makes it more of a concern.

You can fit me into the "greenhouse deniers" if you like, but I'm suspicious of pretty much all the data that is surrounding this issue -- there is too much money to be made on "popular" science like this for there to be any real hope of getting sound scientific data right now...

Seriously? You're actually being serious when you say that? Have you even looked at what the funding level is for climate science as opposed to, I don

Canada was getting a pretty bad rap last month and the sad part is that the big polluters were the ones who had the loudest voices.

How about a better comparison: Pollution(CO2 tonnes) vs area of land (km2) [cadvision.com]? This is a better comparison based on the CO2 tonnes divided by the area of the country/region with a resultant tonnes of CO2 per km2 value:

You've got China listed as being 10.5 times the area of the United States and India being 3.6 times as large. They don't teach you maths in Canada or you were just so exited when it put the US in the lead that you forgot to just look over for a brief sanity check?

CO2 and pollution should be tied to 2 things:
Size of area (farming, etc) as well as GDP.
The size of area makes sense for 'fairness', but another issue is how much business somebody does. You will notice that China's pollution rose with GDP rising. They basically, cheated their way to growth, but that is because they are in a cold war.

At this time, controlling CO2 emissions and pollution is not possible because far too many are pushing for OTHERS to do something. What is needed is for nations to TAX A

And you have SERIOUS issues with you calculations. For starters, you show China with 10x the land mass of USA. That alone should let you know that you were incorrect. The reality is that China and USA are about the same size. Instead, grab the data from CIA.gov and parse it correctly.

When that comes out, we are going to find out that CO2 is MUCH MUCH HIGHER.

What is interesting is that this report shows some of the much higher emissions that I have spoken about here. When I mentioned it, I told about a group of ppl that were allowed to monitor them, but could not report it. What few realize still, is that this report is STILL FAKED. What happens is that China has numerous coal plants that have pollution controls on them (required by Japanese treaty), but they purposely turn off (low

What argument do you think was being made? The summary just grouped separate environmental reports into the one post. Do you also think that it was a problem that they mentioned more than one country when the story title just mentioned China?

Some people consider ketchup a vegetable too, but it doesn't make it so.

I could point out that it is neither a fruit nor a vegetable because it is actually a condiment made from a variety of ingredients, but it would be a douche thing to do because it is obvious that you meant the humble tomato - just as the use of the word pollution to describe CO2 does not alter the point of the article.

That said, it does still fit the simple dictionary definition for pollution anyway:

Noun:
The presence in or introduction into the environment of a substance or thing that has harmful or poiso

No, I meant ketchup. You may be a little too young to remember the issue, but I chose my words carefully. And you are correct - ketchup is not a vegetable, and no amount of partisan political sleight-of-hand was able to make it a vegetable.

The theme in the article does, whether you want to acknowledge it or not, go back and forth just as the OP you were replying to said it does - talking about 'pollution' and then changing the subject completely to talk about CO2, then talking about pollution again, as if t

Except that's not really true when you factor into the equation all of the costs of manufacturing. Sure China has cheap labor and non-existent labor laws, but that's not the only cost. There's the cost of shipping, the cost of redoing shoddy work, the costs related to difficulties in monitoring the process, the different view of how contracts work and the cost of product recalls if there's too much lead or melamine in the product. Even trying to manufacture a product in the US for a EU business can be signi